Circle Ventures, the investment arm of USDC stablecoin issuer Circle, has invested in the USD 20 M African Blockchain Fund run by CV VC (Crypto Valley Venture Capital), marking a pivotal bet on Africa’s growing stablecoin-driven digital asset ecosystem.

The Cayman-Islands–domiciled fund focuses on early-stage African startups using blockchain for fintech, payments, and data infrastructure. This shift towards infrastructure investment follows a wave of crypto exchange shutdowns across the continent, as capital now flows to startups tackling structural issues like currency volatility, cross-border payment friction, and financial exclusion.

Launched in 2022 by CV VC Africa Managing Partner Gideon Greaves, the African Blockchain Fund has previously backed ventures in Nigeria, Kenya, and South Africa. Circle’s participation signals growing confidence from global players that Africa’s digital asset future will be built on stablecoin-powered utility rather than speculative trading.

This comes as stablecoins now account for 43% of all crypto transaction volume in sub-Saharan Africa, according to Chainalysis, with Nigerians receiving UD 24 B in stablecoins in 2024 alone; the second highest globally.

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The Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) has committed USD 10 M to the Novastar Ventures Africa People and Planet Fund III, managed by Novastar Ventures.

JICA is co-investing with British International Investment and other development finance institutions as well as financial and strategic investors in the private sector, including Japanese corporates.

The project will finance startups engaged in impactful businesses via investing in Novastar, a leader of the venture capital market and startup ecosystem in Africa. It aims to empower people through economic and social inclusion, promote sustainable and climate-positive economic activities, and thereby contribute to economic development and addressing social challenges in Africa.

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Kenyan Startup, BuuPass, has received new funding from Yango Ventures, the investment arm of Yango Group. The financial terms of...

Source

Swyft, a Cameroon-based logistics tech startup, has received a pre-seed investment from the University of Michigan International Investment Fund (IIF) to scale its B2B and B2C delivery services across Africa.

Founded in 2019, the IIF backs SMEs in emerging markets. Swyft, which specializes in first-to-last mile logistics, will use the funding to expand operations and enhance its tech platform.

“This partnership validates our mission to modernize African logistics,” said Franck Batchadji, Swyft’s CEO. The IIF praised Swyft’s potential to transform delivery services in Cameroon and beyond.

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When people think “startup,” they imagine some hoodie-wearing genius building AI in a garage, or inventing the next impossible piece of tech that’ll “change the world.” But innovation doesn’t always come wrapped in code or complexity.

Sometimes, it comes in the form of…a potato. Or a glitter bomb. Or a bag of air. And that’s the thing most people miss. The reason most startup ideas fail is that they’re poorly executed. How an idea is brought to life, packaged, marketed, and monetised can make all the difference.

This same applies to wild ideas. Even the strangest concepts can work when they’re packaged and marketed properly purpose.

And yes, some startups have taken off like that. The products were weird on purpose, but the founders behind them understood their audience and were smart in execution. They leaned into what made their idea unforgettable, doubled down on the absurdity, nailed the pitch and got the right people to buy in.

Although not all started with this intent to reach a broader audience, the success behind some of these startups shows that if you package a product well, you can reach a much wider audience that is willing to go “Take my money,” however weird the idea might be.

Here are ten of the most wonderfully weird, delightfully unexpected startup ideas that took off, even got funded, and in some cases, made a killing.

1. Potato Parcel

Potato Parcel lets you send a message to someone on a real potato. That’s the entire product.

You go to the site, type your message, and they print it on a spud and mail it. It could be a birthday note, a breakup line, or just a picture of your face. It’s absurd on purpose, and people love it for that.

Started in 2015 by Alex Craig, the business grew quickly. In just over a year, they generated over USD 215 K in revenue. When the founder pitched it on Shark Tank, Kevin O’Leary invested USD 50 K for 10% equity. Since then, it’s shipped over 70,000 potatoes worldwide.

Potato Parcel works because it’s a perfect mix of novelty and surprise. It’s a one-time gift that people can’t help but talk about. In a world of boring e-cards and recycled memes, this was just strange enough to break through.

2. Ship Your Enemies Glitter

The concept here is blunt. Pay a small fee and they’ll send your nemesis an envelope filled with loose glitter. It explodes when opened, getting everywhere. You stay anonymous. They get sparkled. Everybody wins. Or loses. Depends on who you ask.

When this site launched in 2015, it went viral overnight. The founder, Mathew Carpenter, received over 2,000 orders in the first 24 hours. He panicked, hated the attention, and sold the site for USD 85 K just days later. The buyer turned it into a long-term business and added new services like confetti bombs and spring-loaded glitter tubes.

This wasn’t about utility. It was about giving people a way to act out their feelings—anonymously, playfully, and with no real consequences. People aren’t buying glitter. They’re buying petty satisfaction.

3. Vitality Air

In the early days, Vitality Air started as a prank. Two Canadian entrepreneurs began bottling fresh air from Banff National Park and selling it online. The packaging looked like something from a health spa, but the product was air.

But in parts of the world where clean air isn’t guaranteed, it hit a nerve. When they launched in China, their first shipment of 500 bottles sold out in under a week. Since then, they’ve expanded to India, South Korea, the Middle East, and the UK.

Each can of air costs around USD 20 to USD 30, with some high-end versions going for more. The brand has grown far beyond novelty. It’s now marketed as a health and wellness item for urban professionals living in polluted cities.

4. Dinner in the Sky

Dinner in the Sky offers a fine dining experience, but suspended 150 feet in the air. A crane lifts a platform where guests are seated, belted into chairs around a table, with a chef and waitstaff in the middle. The menu is high-end. So is the adrenaline.

This started in Belgium in 2006. It sounded like a stunt. But the demand kept coming. It now operates in over 60 countries, hosting everything from private dinners to corporate events and tourism experiences. They’ve partnered with brands like Ferrari and Forbes. The company has since spun off into multiple franchises, licensing the concept around the world.

5. Unagi Travel

Unagi Travel is a Japanese company that runs tours for stuffed animals. Customers ship their plush toy to Tokyo, and it’s taken on guided “tours” of local sights. Along the way, it’s photographed at temples, shops, restaurants, and even trains. The toy comes back with photos and souvenirs.

This isn’t marketed to kids. It’s often used by adults, many of them dealing with anxiety, disability, or grief. The stuffed animals represent emotional comfort, and sending them on a journey becomes symbolic. Some say it helps them feel like they’re part of the trip, even if they can’t go themselves.

Unagi Travel has been covered by CNN, NPR, and the BBC. While exact revenue numbers aren’t public, they’ve handled thousands of plush travellers from over 30 countries.

6. Rent-A-Friend

Rent-A-Friend is exactly what it sounds like. You pay someone to hang out with you. That could mean going to a movie, grabbing lunch, attending a wedding, or just walking around the city. It’s strictly platonic, so no dating or romance. Just time and company.

Founder Scott Rosenbaum originally built it off the back of another business (a dating site), but Rent-A-Friend stood on its own. It launched quietly but picked up traction as loneliness became a more public issue. Not everyone has a circle of friends on standby, and sometimes people just want someone to talk to who won’t judge them or ghost them.

The idea was easy to dismiss at first. But since launching in 2009, the site has grown to hundreds of thousands of registered “friends” worldwide. Some earn up to USD 2 K a week, depending on availability and location. When you look at the way people crave connection, especially in cities where millions live side by side without speaking to each other, it makes sense. Rent-A-Friend stepped into that gap and built a business on something we usually take for granted.

7. Entomo Farms

Entomo Farms raises crickets and turns them into food. As in real food for real people. They grind them into flour, press them into bars, and use them in protein-rich recipes meant to replace traditional meat or dairy sources.

In Western countries, this still turns heads. But in other parts of the world, insects have been on the menu for centuries. What makes Entomo Farms different is that they’ve found a way to present it to new markets as clean, nutritious, and sustainable.

The company started in Canada and quickly positioned itself as a leader in the edible insect movement. It has since raised millions in funding, including a USD 3.7 M investment from investors like Maple Leaf Foods to expand production and distribution. Its cricket protein is now used in over 50 product lines across North America.

8. DoodyCalls

DoodyCalls is a pet waste removal service. You call them, and they show up to clean the dog poop from your yard. That’s the entire business.

It was founded in 2000 by Jacob D’Aniello and his wife after they realised people would pay to have someone else deal with their dog’s mess.

It’s grown steadily for over two decades, expanding across the U.S. and becoming the largest pet waste franchise in the country as pet ownership has exploded, and not everyone wants to deal with the mess. DoodyCalls took an everyday annoyance and turned it into a professional, reliable service.

DoodyCalls handles tens of thousands of service calls per week and was acquired in 2021 by Authority Brands, a major home services conglomerate.

9. Pavlok

Pavlok is a wearable device that shocks you when you engage in a habit you want to stop. If you bite your nails, hit snooze, or scroll too long on your phone, you get a jolt. Not enough to hurt, but enough to make your brain take notice.

Inventor Maneesh Sethi first built a prototype with duct tape and an Arduino. After blogging about hiring someone to slap him every time he used Facebook, the idea blew up. Pavlok raised over USD 284 K on Indiegogo, launched to strong press coverage, and eventually gained over 100,000 users worldwide. They later went on Shark Tank, where Sethi famously turned down Kevin O’Leary’s offer, calling him “Mr. Know-Nothing.” The moment went viral, and so did Pavlok.

It’s based on behavioural conditioning. Do the thing, get the shock. Repeat it enough times, and your brain starts to associate the habit with discomfort.

The concept sounds harsh, but it appealed to people who’ve tried and failed with softer methods.

10. And Vinyly

And Vinyly offers a way to press a loved one’s ashes into a vinyl record. You choose the music or audio. They handle the production. What comes back is a playable record infused with the physical remains of someone you lost.

The founder, Jason Leach, had worked in the music industry and saw a gap for something more meaningful than a standard urn or grave. The idea took off in niche death-positive circles and art communities. They’ve since been featured in VICE, The Guardian, and BBC, and the service costs around USD 4 K–USD 5 K per record, depending on customisation.

It’s not a mass-market service. It doesn’t need to be. And Vinyly found a small group of people looking for a different kind of closure, and it gave them a way to hold onto it.

If you look at every business here, they were born from an idea that sounded uninvestable, unscalable, or just plain weird. Yet each one carved out a customer base and made real money. Some went viral. Some flew under the radar. But they all proved one thing: There’s room in the market for strange ideas, as long as they’re built with care and delivered with intent.

The post 10 Outrageous Startup Ideas That Actually Worked appeared first on WeeTracker.

Dakar-based healthtech startup Eyone Medical has raised USD 3 M from Oyass Capital, a new Senegalese government-backed private equity fund focused on scaling high-impact SMEs. The deal was announced at Oyass’s launch event, marking one of its first investments.

Founded in 2015 by Henri Ousmane Gueye and John Diatta, Eyone provides interoperable digital health systems, including its flagship Shared Patient Record platform, which enables clinics and hospitals to securely share and manage patient data.

The platform is used in over 60 healthcare institutions across Senegal, Mali, Côte d’Ivoire, Cameroon, Gabon, and France.

The new funding will help Eyone, which previously raised USD 1 M and secured another USD 300 K in prize money, integrate AI into its systems, enhance infrastructure, and expand across Francophone West Africa, where fragmented health records and inefficiencies remain major challenges.

The deal also reflects a growing trend of public-private co-investment in strategic sectors like healthtech, with governments like Senegal’s taking a more active role in startup funding.

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Village Capital’s Africa Ecosystem Catalysts Facility (AECF), a US$4 million program aimed at investing in startups creating context-specific solutions that improve economic mobility and climate resilience in Ghana, Nigeria, and Tanzania, has announced five Entrepreneur Support Organizations (ESOs) as venture partners. The AECF, which is managed by Village Capital in partnership with the Dutch Entrepreneurial...

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Cape Town-based venture capital firm Knife Capital is marking its 15th anniversary with a pair of new Series A investments into South African startups Sticitt and Optique; two tech-driven businesses tackling entrenched problems in school payments and eye care.

Fintech startup Sticitt, founded in 2018 by Theo Kitshof, is digitising school payments while gamifying financial literacy for students. Its platform is used by over 75,000 users across 841 schools and has processed more than ZAR 6.3 B in transactions.

Beyond simplifying how parents pay for school services, the company, which previously raised seed funding in 2022, is positioning its youth banking tool as a driver of long-term financial inclusion. Knife’s investment builds on earlier backing via Grindstone Ventures, with this latest round intended to streamline the cap table and accelerate expansion.

Optique, launched in 2017, is challenging the traditional optometry model with a digitally enabled, low-cost offering. With 19 branches and an online store, the company targets under-served South Africans, offering ZAR 99.00 eye tests, all-inclusive pricing, and interest-free plans.

Founder Leon van Vuuren said the Knife backing will support national growth and bring world-class eye care to consumers left behind by legacy providers.

Knife Capital, which manages three funds, including the newly launched Knife Fund III, says these bets reflect a sharper focus on scalable, impact-driven innovation as it enters its next growth phase.

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Kenyan mobility startup BuuPass has secured an undisclosed strategic investment from Yango Ventures, marking a new phase in its plan to digitise long-distance travel across Africa.

The deal brings fresh backing from Yango Group’s newly launched USD 20 M corporate venture fund, focused on high-growth markets in sectors like B2B SaaS, fintech, and O2O platforms.

Founded in 2016 by Sonia Kabra and Wyclife Omondi, BuuPass has become a central layer of digital infrastructure for Africa’s fragmented intercity travel and logistics sector.

Its platform enables consumers to book intercity buses, trains, flights, and parcel services while equipping operators with software for inventory, payments, and fleet management. Through APIs, mobile apps, USSD, and offline sales agents, BuuPass processes transactions across multiple layers of Africa’s informal transport economy.

The company now operates in Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, and South Africa, working with over 150 transport providers. It processed over USD 70 M in bookings and sold 20 million tickets in 2024 alone. Last year’s acquisition of QuickBus in South Africa, on the heels of a USD 1.3 M pre-seed in 2023, bolstered its supply footprint and regional reach.

BuuPass CEO Kabra described Yango as a partner “who leans in with insight, not just capital” — a nod to the fund’s operational involvement. For Yango, it’s a bet on infrastructure as the enabler of inclusive growth in mobility. For BuuPass, it’s momentum in its bid to become the API for how Africa moves.

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In much of Africa, trade isn’t held back by a lack of goods or buyers but stalled by cash flow. Exporters ship products, then wait 30, 60, sometimes 90 days to get paid. Banks, when they show up at all, take weeks to process financing and charge fees that make it unworkable for small firms.

Ghanaian startup Liquify is betting that this friction can be abstracted, standardised, and sold as a scalable asset class.

The company just raised USD 1.5 M in seed equity and additional debt financing to expand its digital invoice-financing platform, which helps small exporters in Ghana and Kenya get same-day cash for unpaid invoices.

Since launching its beta in late 2024, Liquify has financed over USD 4 M in transactions, mostly agricultural and light manufacturing exports headed to Europe and North America, as it pursues a quest to close Africa’s USD 120 B annual trade finance gap.

The pitch is classic fintech: speed, automation, and bypassing banks. Liquify’s platform wraps onboarding, KYC, AML, credit scoring, and settlement into a streamlined process that clears invoices in hours, not weeks.

“The average bank process takes over 10 days and costs more than USD 10 K to serve a single SME,” said co-founder and CEO Nadya Yaremenko, a former Citi exec who managed a USD 3 B trade finance portfolio. “We bring that down to a fraction of the time and cost.”

But what Liquify is really doing is making trade receivables investable. The startup buys export invoices at a discount, offering liquidity to SMEs while giving global investors access to short-term, self-liquidating assets, unlinked from broader financial market swings. Investors get yield; exporters get working capital. Everyone avoids the banks.

Of course, there’s a reason this gap hasn’t been filled. The team has had to build trust with SMEs used to informal lending and persuade foreign investors that fragmented invoice claims from African exporters can function like an asset class.

Co-founder Alberta Asafo-Asamoah, who came from the impact investing world, saw up close how “patient capital” wasn’t fast or flexible enough to scale SME exports. Liquify is taking a more transactional route, one that looks less like aid and more like arbitrage.

With the new funding, Liquify plans to expand its risk and compliance engine, grow into Francophone Africa, and test structured investment products.

Whether African trade finance becomes fintech’s next frontier or just another category of repackaged risk may depend on how well the startup balances local complexity with global appetite. For now, Liquify is betting that Africa’s slowest money problem is also its most bankable.

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Across markets in Dakar, the Senegalese capital, vendors used to lose nearly a tenth of their daily earnings just by accepting mobile payments. Every transfer from a customer came with a fee (sometimes 5%, even 10%) sliced away by the telecom companies that dominated Senegal’s mobile money market for nearly a decade. Then, in 2018, something changed.

A new player, Wave, arrived with a simple pitch: What if sending money cost almost nothing? And Senegal’s mass market quickly embraced this new order.

That promise—radically cheaper digital payments—has turned Wave into one of Africa’s most valuable startups. Now, with a fresh USD 137 M debt round led by Rand Merchant Bank (RMB) and backed by global development financiers, the company is doubling down on its mission: to make Africa the first cashless continent.

Wave’s rise reads like a playbook for how to disrupt a monopoly. Before its launch, mobile money in West Africa was controlled by telecom operators like Orange, which charged fees as high as 10% per transaction. For millions of small merchants and low-income users, those fees made digital payments more expensive than cash.

Then came Wave—no fees on deposits or withdrawals, just a flat 1% on transfers, with bill payments subsidised by businesses rather than customers. The model was so aggressively consumer-friendly that skeptics questioned its sustainability. Yet six years later, Wave is thriving.

Today, the company operates in eight West African countries, serving 20 million monthly active users through a network of 150,000 mobile money agents. In 2021, it became Francophone Africa’s first unicorn after a record-breaking USD 200 M Series A. Now, with this new funding, it’s eyeing further expansion into Central and East Africa.

The USD 137 M debt round—led by RMB and supported by British International Investment (BII), Norfund, and Finnfund—comes at a pivotal moment. Africa’s startup ecosystem has seen venture funding dip, but debt financing is emerging as an alternative, especially for companies like Wave that have provable scale and revenue.

For development financiers, the appeal is clear as Wave is well-positioned as a financial inclusion machine. “Wave’s platform is a clear example of technology enabling inclusive finance at scale,” said a representative from British International Investment. “This is aligned with our mandate to support digital infrastructure that empowers communities.”

Wave CEO and co-founder Drew Durbin said in a statement that the new “funding means we can help even more people by delivering the best possible product at the lowest possible price.”

“It brings us closer to our mission of making Africa the first cashless continent.”

The numbers back him up. In Senegal alone, Wave now processes more transactions than some traditional banks. And for two years running, it’s been the only African company on Y Combinator’s list of top 50 highest-earning startups.

Wave’s ambitions, however, face real obstacles. Regulators are watching closely as fintechs gain influence, and in some countries, telecom operators still hold political sway. Then there’s the sheer dominance of cash—90% of transactions in Africa are still offline, per World Bank data.

But if anyone can shift that balance, it might be Wave. After all, it’s already done the unthinkable once: making digital money cheaper than cash and accessible to everyone, not just the rich as in the past, while wrestling market share from telecom giants. Now, with fresh capital and a continent still ripe for disruption, it’s betting it can do it again at scale.

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Better Auth started in an Addis Ababa bedroom with a stubborn problem. Its founder, Bereket Engida, a self-taught developer, was tired of relying on expensive, opaque services like Auth0 and Firebase to handle the messy, critical job of user signups and logins.

So he built an open-source tool that lets developers embed customisable authentication directly into their own code — and kept all the data where it belonged, in their database.

Today, that tiny project has become one of the fastest-rising developer platforms out of Africa. After gaining 150,000 weekly downloads and 15,000 stars on GitHub, Better Auth has just announced a USD 5 M seed round led by Peak XV, with Y Combinator, Chapter One, and P1 Ventures also joining in. It’s the biggest bet yet on an Ethiopian founder tackling global developer infrastructure.

“This funding fuels the next phase of Better Auth,” reads the company’s announcement. “We wanted to prove that you can build global infrastructure out of Africa,” Engida said in an earlier interview with Addis Insight.

The appeal is obvious. In an era when cybersecurity and privacy concerns dominate, Better Auth is a shot across the bow of hosted services that treat user data like a commodity.

Its TypeScript-based framework gives developers a modular way to implement advanced sign-in, role-based access, and session management, making it ideal for early-stage AI startups and SaaS platforms that want to control their own data and save costs.

For Engida, a programmer who started coding after a friend declined to help him build an e‑commerce search tool, this went beyond making a better login as he set out to reshape an industry that treats access and authentication as a bottleneck.

Better Auth’s approach is rooted in a very specific frustration. “I remember needing an organisation feature. It’s a very common use case for most SaaS applications, but it wasn’t available from these providers,” Engida told TechCrunch.

“So I had to build it from scratch. It took me about two weeks, and I remember thinking, ‘This is crazy; there has to be a better way to solve this.’” So he started coding. And when he posted it to GitHub in September 2024, it quickly caught the attention of developers.

In six months, it went from a fledgling GitHub repo to a bustling library with a dedicated following of over 6,000 developers. Its open source core allows teams to self‑host or pick from plug‑and‑play enterprise add‑ons. That approach has started resonating far beyond its Ethiopian roots, making it the first African-led investment for Peak XV.

“Better Auth’s auth product has seen phenomenal adoption among the next generation of AI startups,” said Peak XV partner Arnav Sahu.

Fresh off a stint in Y Combinator, Engida and his co‑founder Kinfe Michael Tariku now have Silicon Valley backing and a global roadmap. The seed funding will help hire a small engineering team, deepen enterprise tooling, and build a seamless experience for developers wary of vendor lock‑in.

At a time when digital trust is under siege and the cost of relying on Big Tech platforms is rising, this Ethiopian upstart is making the case that the best foundation for a connected world can come from anywhere.

For Engida, it’s still early days. “There’s so much more to build,” the founders note. But in a global market tired of compromises, Better Auth may already be the right tool at the right time.

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MyNextCar (MNC), a key fleet enabler for Bolt in South Africa, has raised USD 10 M in its first institutional funding round—capital that could reshape the country’s low-cost ride-hailing landscape.

The investment, led by London-based Emso Asset Management with backing from Bolt, Assemble Capital, and E2 Investments, will help MNC scale its operations and roll out 1,500 new vehicles under Bolt Lite, a budget-focused category powered by the compact Bajaj Qute.

For Bolt and its partners, it’s a bet on a model that brings affordability, accessibility, and local relevance to South Africa’s mobility market.

Despite the success of Bolt Lite in pilot phases, the journey hasn’t been frictionless. Violent resistance from traditional taxi operators and illegal vehicle impoundments have made lenders wary.

This new funding signals renewed confidence in MNC’s ability to overcome those headwinds and validate an alternative future for urban transport.

To date, MNC has enabled over 700 drivers to earn on Bolt’s platform, with 43% of them being youth and 4% being women.

That demographic tilt is no coincidence. Both Bolt and MNC frame their partnership as part of a broader play to combat youth unemployment and expand financial inclusion via asset-light vehicle access. “This isn’t just about adding cars, it’s about changing lives,” a company spokesperson said.

The investment is also a vote of confidence from Emso, whose previous backing of Moove, a vehicle-financing startup for ride-hailing drivers, signals a growing interest in Africa’s mobility-fintech intersection. E2 Investments’ participation reinforces its impact-driven mandate to fund ventures that generate jobs in underserved segments.

By backing a business model built on small vehicles, lean economics, and broad access, the funders are effectively helping Bolt cement its presence in South Africa’s price-sensitive transport market.

With competition heating up and regulatory tensions still simmering, MNC’s next phase will test whether scale, impact, and margins can co-exist in the country’s rapidly evolving ride-hailing economy.

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Salus Cloud, a South African startup aiming to become the go-to DevOps platform for Africa’s developers, has raised USD 3.7 M in seed funding to accelerate product development and scale its presence across the continent.

The round was co-led by Atlantica Ventures and P1 Ventures, with backing from LoftyInc’s Idris Bello, Everywhere Ventures, and Essence VC’s Timothy Chen.

Built by Andrew Mori, also the founder of Deimos (one of Google Cloud’s largest partners in Africa), Salus Cloud wants to solve a stubborn but overlooked pain point in the continent’s tech stack: secure, scalable, affordable DevOps.

As more startups emerge across Africa, many are forced to either jury-rig insecure manual deployments or overpay for CI/CD tools built for Silicon Valley scale and pricing, neither of which suits the lean realities of African tech companies.

Salus Cloud offers an AI-native, developer-first platform that automates security fixes, simplifies software delivery, and packages it all at a price startups can actually afford.

Its self-service tier starts at USD 9.00 per developer, while its enterprise package, at USD 5 K per month, is pitched as cheaper than hiring one DevOps engineer in Lagos or Nairobi. Five enterprise clients are already onboard, with fintechs leading the early charge.

But the startup aims to go beyond cost-cutting, its founder emphasises, as the goal is to give African startups the infrastructure to move fast without breaking things, or budgets.

Mori says the goal is to support 50–500 enterprise teams and tens of thousands of developers by 2026. And unlike many imported tools, Salus is purpose-built for the continent’s realities, where connectivity is patchy, teams are small, and every dollar spent on tooling must show ROI.

This funding signals a broader shift in how investors are thinking about Africa’s tech ecosystem. The boom in startups is creating downstream demand for infrastructure: dev tools, cloud platforms, and scalable workflows that can handle hypergrowth without burning capital. Salus Cloud sits squarely in that opportunity space.

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South African agri-tech startup Nile has raised USD 11.3 M (ZAR 200 M) in a fresh funding round to scale its digital agricultural marketplace across Southern Africa, betting that technology can bring coherence and capital into one of the continent’s most chaotic value chains.

The round was led by the Cathay AfricInvest Innovation Fund, with participation from FMO, the Dutch entrepreneurial development bank, and existing investor Platform Investment Partners. This brings Nile’s total raised to over USD 16 M since its founding in 2021.

At its core, Nile is a digital B2B marketplace designed to remove the layers of inefficiency that have historically plagued African agriculture. Price opacity, delayed payments, excessive food waste, and too many middlemen between farm and fork are persistent problems.

What started as an online produce exchange has quietly evolved into a one-stop agri-commerce platform, bundling trade, inputs, logistics, and even credit under one interface.

It’s a compelling pitch. By streamlining fragmented supply chains, Nile helps farmers capture more value and access a wider pool of buyers, including export markets in the Middle East and Southeast Asia.

The platform now facilitates cross-border trade using road, sea, and air freight, connecting producers from Southern Africa with demand in East and West Africa, and beyond.

But the company’s ambitions go well beyond brokering transactions. Nile is building a digital ecosystem that locks in users with a growing suite of services. It promises everything from fertiliser and packaging to finance and instant payments.

The plan is to deliver immediate utility, then layer on value-added services to drive retention and recurring revenue.

Investors are buying into that vision. “Nile is transforming fresh produce trading by addressing farmers’ full range of needs—from inputs and trading to financing,” said Henry Rahmann of AfricInvest. In a sector long overdue for digitisation, Nile is positioning itself as infrastructure, not just an app.

And the timing seems favourable. Global interest in agri-marketplaces is surging. AgFunder reports a 77% jump in upstream agri-tech funding in emerging markets last year alone.

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South African coding academy WeThinkCode has secured a USD 2 M grant from Google.org to scale its AI skills training programmes across South Africa and Kenya.

It’s a significant boost to Africa’s rising role in the global digital economy as the move signals not just philanthropic goodwill, but a strategic investment in plugging one of the continent’s most pressing talent gaps: AI readiness.

The funding will empower 12,000 learners—half of them in non-technical roles—to gain practical AI knowledge through a new curriculum designed to meet both the region’s socio-economic realities and its future-of-work ambitions.

The initiative couldn’t be more timely. According to a SAP report cited by the academy, 90% of African companies are already feeling the pain of AI skills shortages, manifesting as delayed projects, abandoned innovations, and lost business.

Founded in 2015 by Arlene Mulder, Camille Agon and Yossi Hasson, WeThinkCode has earned a reputation for its tuition-free, aptitude-based tech training model that targets youth from underserved backgrounds.

This new AI programme is an extension of that mission, with a dual-track approach. One stream will train 6,000 aspiring and early-career software engineers to integrate AI tools into their development workflows.

The other will equip 6,000 junior professionals in fields like healthcare, education, and law to use AI for everyday productivity; think automating admin tasks, synthesising data, and supercharging routine work.

Courses will be delivered in 40 to 80-hour modules, both in-person and online, with local language support built into WeThinkCode’s upgraded learning platform.

The programme will also tap into the academy’s corporate partnerships in finance, telecoms, and tech consulting to help learners showcase their new capabilities—and crucially, get hired.

The grant also positions Google among a growing list of tech giants and VCs betting on Africa’s AI potential. Last year, Nigerian startup JADA raised USD 1 M to train mid-career data professionals in AI leadership roles. Taken together, these efforts suggest that Africa’s AI talent pipeline is coming together.

“We don’t just want to prepare young people for jobs,” said Nyari Samushonga, CEO of WeThinkCode. “We want them to shape the future of work itself.”

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Eighteen months ago, Karim Jouini and Jihed Othmani were ready to retire from startup life, fresh off a nine-figure exit.

Their expense management platform, Expensya, had just been acquired by Swedish fintech Medius in a deal reportedly worth over USD 120 M—one of Africa’s largest tech acquisitions made in Tunisia.

But the pull of generative AI and a nagging sense that they had unfinished business has drawn them back into the ring.

Their new startup, Thunder Code, has raised USD 9 M in seed funding to automate and rethink software testing from the ground up using generative AI.

Led by Silicon Badia, with participation from Janngo Capital, Titan Seed Fund, and strategic angels like Roxanne Varza of Station F and Karim Beguir of InstaDeep, the round includes familiar names from the Expensya era, some of whom are former employees turned investors.

Thunder Code is betting that quality assurance (QA), an often-overlooked but crucial bottleneck in software delivery, is ripe for reinvention.

The startup’s platform uses AI “agents” to autonomously understand apps, generate and execute tests, and catch bugs, promising to cut testing time by up to 90%.

In a world obsessed with shipping faster, it’s a pitch that’s already gaining traction with pilot programs in the U.S., France, Tunisia, and Canada.

Unlike Expensya, which took years to mature, Thunder Code shipped its MVP in just six weeks. “We’re moving 10x faster this time,” Jouini says, noting that the product today is already more robust than Expensya was in year four.

The founder emphasises that from day one, they have applied hard lessons: ship fast, hire top-tier talent early, and don’t be afraid of dilution if it buys speed and expertise.

Their timing is sharp. The global software testing market is projected to top USD 100 B by 2027, yet much of it still relies on clunky, code-heavy platforms.

Thunder Code joins a growing list of startups racing to modernise testing with AI, from incumbents like Tricentis to new entrants like Nova AI, but believes its execution speed and real-world traction give it a meaningful edge.

More than just a second act, Thunder Code feels like a startup born from unfinished ambition. “We promised not to do this again,” Jouini admits. “But the opportunity felt too big to ignore.”

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SORA Technology, a Japan-born Africa-focused startup integrating drones and AI to combat infectious diseases and climate change, has raised USD 4.8 M in a late seed funding round.

The round included participation from Nissay Capital’s Sustainability Challenge Fund, SMBC Venture Capital, DRONE FUND, Central Japan Seed Fund, and Rheos Capital Works, bringing the company’s total funding to approximately JPY 670 M (approx. USD 4.8 M), including debt financing.

SORA’s flagship initiative, SORA Malaria Control, employs drones and AI to identify and manage mosquito breeding sites, optimising Larval Source Management (LSM) by reducing insecticide use by approximately 70% and labour costs by about 50%.

The company is active in six African countries—Ghana, Sierra Leone, Benin, DRC, Senegal, and Kenya—collaborating with governments and institutions to implement drone-based malaria control and AI-powered disease forecasting systems .

The new funding will be utilised to enhance AI algorithms for infectious disease prediction, expand field operations across African partner countries, strengthen partnerships with international institutions and governments, and improve drone systems and local deployment capabilities.

SORA’s approach has garnered international recognition, including being awarded the iF Social Impact Prize for its innovative use of drones and AI in combating malaria.

This investment shows growing international recognition of SORA’s mission to build resilient, technology-enabled infrastructure for global health and climate resilience. The participation of sustainability-focused investors reflects strong alignment with SORA’s values and long-term vision.

As the intersection of public health, climate action, and technology becomes a key priority in sustainable development, SORA Technology stands in a unique position, leveraging advanced technology to address pressing global challenges.

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Beemi, an Ethiopian startup enhancing mobile livestreaming with interactive games, has secured undisclosed seed funding from Renew Capital to expand its platform and partnerships. The investment aims to help Beemi transform passive audiences into engaged communities through gamified tools and live interaction.

Founded in 2023 by Dawit Abraham, Beemi integrates social games like trivia into livestreaming platforms such as TikTok, YouTube, and Twitch.

Optimised for mobile, it allows streamers to launch games directly within live sessions, encouraging followers to stay longer and participate actively. Beemi is also piloting monetisation features, including branded ad integrations, creator subscriptions, and a marketplace of streamable games.

The platform has demonstrated significant engagement, with its “Family-Feud” style game show on TikTok LIVE attracting nearly 15,000 viewers, 2,000 participants, and 700 new followers during an 11-hour stream. Beemi’s approach addresses the need for more interactive and rewarding livestream experiences, particularly in Africa’s growing digital landscape.

With Africa’s youthful and increasingly connected population, platforms like Beemi are well-positioned to redefine entertainment consumption on the continent.

As Beemi continues to develop its platform and expand its reach, it exemplifies how localised, mobile-first solutions can unlock new opportunities in Africa’s digital economy.

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